High school biology taught us that we inherit certain traits from our parents that are pre-determined. But what if you could change how these genes play out by taking certain drugs or better yet, just changing your diet? That's exactly what a team of researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have proposed through their research of epigenetics research. Epigenetics regulates gene expression in a reversible manner by chemically modifying DNA and histone proteins, which prevent permanent mutations or alterations within the gene themselves. Throughout ...

WASHINGTON, DC – September 14, 2014 – A new study found that fractional flow reserve (FFR)-guided provisional side branch (SB) stenting of true coronary bifurcation lesions yields similar outcomes to the current standard of care. The DKCRUSH-VI clinical trial is the first study to compare FFR-guided and angiography-guided stenting. Findings were reported today at the 26th annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium. Sponsored by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), TCT is the world's premier educational meeting specializing in ...

WASHINGTON, DC – September 14, 2014 – A new clinical trial comparing the use of everolimus-eluting stents (EES) and drug-eluting balloons (DEB) in treating in-stent restenosis (ISR) from drug-eluting stents found that EES provided superior late angiographic results and better late clinical outcomes. Findings were reported today at the 26th annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium. Sponsored by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), TCT is the world's premier educational meeting specializing in interventional cardiovascular medicine. ...

As the number of children with food allergies in the U.S. increases, so does the risk of children having a severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis on school campuses. School nurses often have treatment plans in place for students with diagnosed allergies, but many children have their first allergic reactions at school, where a specific medication, such as EpiPen epinephrine injectors, may not be available and a response protocol may not be in place. Students with identified food allergies are generally well known to school nurses. School ...

The same viruses that make us sick can take up residence in and on the human body without provoking a sneeze, cough or other troublesome symptom, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. On average, healthy individuals carry about five types of viruses on their bodies, the researchers report online in BioMed Central Biology. The study is the first comprehensive analysis to describe the diversity of viruses in healthy people. The research was conducted as part of the Human Microbiome Project, a major initiative funded by the ...

Treatment with endocrine therapy and radiation therapy as part of breast conservation is the current standard of care for women with hormone-receptor positive (HR+) invasive breast cancer. A new study by researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center, however, shows that combination may not be necessary for all patient populations with the disease. The results, which Fox Chase researchers presented at the American Society for Radiation Oncology's 56th Annual Meeting on Sunday, September 14, suggest that low-risk patients over 65 years old with small tumors may achieve comparable ...

Men with prostate cancer may one day be able to predict when and how much various treatments will impact their urinary and sexual functioning, thanks in part to new findings that researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center presented at the American Society for Radiation Oncology's 56th Annual Meeting on Tuesday, September 16. Looking over data gathered from more than 17,000 surveys completed by men diagnosed with prostate cancer, Fox Chase researchers tracked when patients' urinary and sexual symptoms changed following each type of treatment, and by how much. "The ultimate ...

In this issue of PLOS Medicine, Kathleen Holloway from WHO and David Henry (University of Toronto, Canada) evaluated data on reported adherence to WHO essential medicines practices and measures of quality use of medicines from 56 low and middle income countries for 2002-2008. They compared the countries' government-reported implementation of 36 essential medicines policies with independent survey results for 10 validated indicators of quality use of medicines (QUM). They claim that the results provide the strongest evidence to date that WHO essential medicines policies ...

Access to female-controlled contraceptive methods must be improved in order to help women and girls to counteract any risks to their reproductive health caused by intimate partner violence and reproductive coercion,* according to US experts writing in this week's PLOS Medicine. Jay Silverman and Anita Raj from the University of California in San Diego explain that intimate partner violence is a major contributor to poor reproductive outcomes, such as unintended pregnancy, among women and girls around the world. The authors argue that to improve reproductive health, ...

The meteorite impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago decimated the evergreens among the flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers, according to a study led by UA researchers. The results are published in the journal PLOS Biology. Applying biomechanical formulas to a treasure trove of thousands of fossilized leaves of angiosperms — flowering plants excluding conifers — the team was able to reconstruct the ecology of a diverse plant community thriving during a 2.2 million-year period spanning the cataclysmic impact event, ...

This release is available in Japanese. A University of Tokyo research group has discovered that pentatraxin 3 (PTX3), a protein that helps the innate immune system target invaders such as bacteria and viruses, can reduce mortality of mice suffering from sepsis. This discovery may lead to a therapy for sepsis, a major cause of death in developed countries that is fatal in one in four cases. Professor Takao Hamakubo's group at the Department of Quantitative Biology and Medicine, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), have shown that PTX3 forms ...

66 million years ago, a 10-km diameter chunk of rock hit the Yukatan peninsula near the site of the small town of Chicxulub with the force of 100 teratons of TNT. It left a crater more than 150 km across, and the resulting megatsunami, wildfires, global earthquakes and volcanism are widely accepted to have wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of the mammals. But what happened to the plants on which the dinosaurs fed? A new study led by researchers from the University of Arizona reveals that the meteorite impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs also decimated ...

We respond to infections in two fundamental ways. One, which has been the subject of intensive research over the years, is "resistance," where the body attacks the invading pathogen and reduces its numbers. Another, which is much less well understood, is "tolerance," where the body tries to minimise the damage done by the pathogen. Now an elegant study using data from a large Swiss cohort of HIV-infected individuals gives us a tantalising glimpse into why some people cope with HIV better than others. The authors find that tolerance varies substantially between individuals, ...

A new point-of-care test to measure CD4 T-cells, the prime indicator of HIV disease progression, can expedite the process leading from HIV diagnosis to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and improve clinical outcomes. Now a study by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators, working in collaboration with colleagues in Mozambique and South Africa, indicates that routine use of point-of-care CD4 testing at the time of HIV diagnosis could be cost effective in countries where health care and other resources are severely limited. Their analysis is being published in the ...

Rice University scientists who created a deicing film for radar domes have now refined the technology to work as a transparent coating for glass. The new work by Rice chemist James Tour and his colleagues could keep glass surfaces from windshields to skyscrapers free of ice and fog while retaining their transparency to radio frequencies (RF). The technology was introduced this month in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces. The material is made of graphene nanoribbons, atom-thick strips of carbon created by splitting nanotubes, ...

Malvern, Pennsylvania, September 16, 2014 – Neuronetics, Inc., today announced that results of a study designed to assess the long-term effectiveness of NeuroStar TMS Therapy in adult patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) who have failed to benefit from prior treatment with antidepressant medications, were published online in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The study found that TMS treatment with the NeuroStar TMS Therapy System induced statistically and clinically meaningful response and remission in patients with treatment resistant MDD during the acute phase ...

NASA's Aqua satellite saw Typhoon Kalmaegi's center near northern Hainan Island, China when it passed overhead on September 16 at 06:00 UTC (2 a.m. EDT). Hours later, the storm crossed the Gulf of Tonkin, the body of water that separates Hainan Island from Vietnam, and was making landfall there at 11:30 a.m. EDT. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua captured a picture of the typhoon that shows the center near the northern end of Hainan Island, China, while the storm stretches over the mainland of southeastern China, east into ...

Face recognition software measures various parameters in a mug shot, such as the distance between the person's eyes, the height from lip to top of their nose and various other metrics and then compares it with photos of people in the database that have been tagged with a given name. Now, research published in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics looks to take that one step further in recognizing the emotion portrayed by a face. Dev Drume Agrawal, Shiv Ram Dubey and Anand Singh Jalal of the GLA University, in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, India, suggest ...

The AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite uses infrared light to read cloud top temperatures in tropical cyclones. When Aqua passed over newborn Tropical Storm Polo off of Mexico's southwestern coast it got a "cold reception" when infrared data saw some very cold cloud top temperatures and strong storms within that hint at intensification. Polo formed close enough to land to trigger a Tropical Storm Watch for the southwestern coast of Mexico. The watch was issued by the government of Mexico on September 16 and extends from Zihuatanejo to Cabo Corrientes, Mexico. ...

Alexandria, Va. — Most people are familiar with the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and are aware of the earthquake risk posed to the Bay Area — and much of California — by the San Andreas Fault. Most people are not aware, however, that a cluster of large earthquakes struck the San Andreas and quite a few nearby faults in the 17th and 18th centuries. That cluster, according to new research, released about the same amount of energy throughout the Bay Area as the 1906 quake. Thus, it appears that the accumulated stress on the region's faults could be released in a series ...

A complex web of interaction between viruses, bacteria, and their environment is becoming ever more untangled by a growing international collaboration between Matthew Sullivan, associate professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Steven Hallam from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "Bacteria are drivers of nutrient and energy cycles that power the earth," Sullivan said. "As the climate is changing, so are the environments these bacteria live in, and they in turn loop back to impact their environments. ...

BOZEMAN, Mont. -- Peak tornado activity in the central and southern Great Plains of the United States is occurring up to two weeks earlier than it did half a century ago, according to a new Montana State University study whose findings could help states in "Tornado Alley" better prepare for these violent storms. Tornado records from Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas – an area of high tornado activity dubbed "Tornado Alley" -- show that peak tornado activity is starting and ending earlier than it did 60 years ago. Peak tornado activity, which occurs ...

San Francisco, September 15, 2014—Patients with inoperable, early-stage lung cancer who receive stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) have a five-year survival rate of 40 percent, according to research presented today at the American Society for Radiation Oncology's (ASTRO's) 56th Annual Meeting. Such a positive survival rate is encouraging considering that historically conventional RT resulted in poor tumor control for patients with inoperable lung cancer. This study is an update of RTOG 0236, originally published in 2010 , and also conducted by the original researchers ...

DURHAM, N.H. – From the salmon-rich waters of Southeast Alaska to the white sand beaches of Florida's Gulf Coast to Downeast Maine's lobster, lumber and tourist towns, coastal residents around the U.S. share a common characteristic: their views about coastal environments divide along political lines. That's a primary finding of a new study by University of New Hampshire sociologists published this month in the journal Society & Natural Resources. "We found a lot of environment-related differences from place to place to place. Each environment is different so that's just ...

Not all things are created equally. We don't view a Picasso sculpture in the same way we look at a hammer, for example — no matter how fancy the hammer. The reason? We see the Picasso more as a person than an object, according to new research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. And in some cases, we make distinctions between artworks — say, an exact replica of a piece created by the artist, versus one created by a different artist. Art, in other words, is an extension of the creator, write Professor Daniel M. Bartels of Chicago Booth, and Professor ...